Gait abnormality might occur due to problems in the nervous system and the musculoskeletal system. The problems in the nervous system, that impairs the patient’s mobility, includes neurodegenerative disorder in the brain and lesions in the spinal cord.

In the preclinical investigation of the disease development and progression, animal models are widely used. For evaluating the motoric symptoms, sensitive assays with a quantifiable output are essential. One of the behavioral tests, which is commonly used, is an automated runway locomotion analysis for rodents, named CatWalk XT (Noldus Information Technology, Wageningen, Netherlands).

The analysis of alpha-synuclein mice gait was studied in sub-project. This alpha-synuclein mouse model is relevant to a neurodegenerative disorder, namely Parkinson’s disease. Based on signal processing approaches, new parameters related to mice locomotion sway has been developed in the study.